


Morrison

by MargotCelvin



Series: Extra Nightmares [8]
Category: IT (2017)
Genre: He curses a lot but it's Richie, I don't know what else to tag here, I'm not going to write about that, It's just Richie interacting with people, Light Angst, Other, Physical Abuse, but it's all like after the fact
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 03:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17358434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MargotCelvin/pseuds/MargotCelvin
Summary: The story of how a boy from California ended up at a school in New York.





	Morrison

**Author's Note:**

> All of this takes place before the events of Nightmares. Like the ending of this is right before the beginning of Nightmares. None of these events are really mentioned (minus one of Richie's nightmares) but it is an introduction to a character that is being introduced in the upcoming chapter.

Richie had a cigarette hanging from his lips as he stared at the canvas in front of him. The woman had spiders crawling around her face, her gaunt face looked a lot like Richie, although that hadn’t been his intention.

“You know you’re not supposed to smoke in here kid.”

“What are you gonna do Ryan, tell the principal on me?”

“No, cause then I’d have to explain why you’re in the art room, also, I still hate that guy.” Ryan Corbin was the art teacher at Richie’s hell of a high school. She walked around to see what Richie was working on. “I feel like she’s staring into my soul.” Her white eyes did give that feeling. One could never really tell where she was looking.

“Kinda the point.” Richie had decided that he was finished with the piece.

“Brought you something.”

“Is it food?”

“Well, yes, but also this,” Ryan handed Richie a brochure for a college. Richie initially rolled his eyes. Ryan had been pushing him to look at universities for months now.

“Again, with this?”

“Just look at it.” Ryan walked back over to her desk as Richie finally looked at the piece of paper.

“Morrison? Really? I’m not good enough for this place.”

“Well, why don’t you just try? What’s the worst that happens?”

“I work my ass off to put the portfolio together only to get rejected and then be crushed and contemplate giving up art as my passion.”

“Or, you get accepted and it will be an amazing experience and opportunity for you. At the very least, you’ll get some good practice on things that you don’t work on as much as you should.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means, you’re good at gothic art, but you don’t practice anything else.”

“Fuck you.” There was no malice behind Richie’s words. He knew that Ryan only wanted the best for him and that she was right. Richie didn’t like to practice anything else, although he knew that if he was going to pursue art full time, he needed to be a little more well-rounded. “I’m still not good enough for Morrison, this is the hardest art program in the country to get into. I would have to put almost everything on hold to even get everything ready in time.”

“Why not just work on it during the periods you’re in here?”

“Because two of them are actual classes?” Richie snubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray that Ryan started keeping here when he started to spend more time here than at home.

“You realize I don’t actually grade your stuff, right?”

“Is it for a good reason or a bad reason?”

“It’s because I don’t need to worry about you understanding the concepts or not doing what I asked. I know that I can give you any assignment and you would ace it. Plus, I watch you work on it in here so why bother actually grading things after you’ve turned it in.”

“Fine. Does this thing have the requirements in it?”

“Yeah.” Richie skimmed over the flyer before turning back to Ryan.

“It says I have to present my admission pieces to them. How the hell am I supposed to do that from the opposite side of the country?”

“I went to school with the chair of the department, he was working on his doctorate while I was getting my undergrad but we were friends.”

“So, you fucked him in college.”

“Who I did and did not fuck in college is none of your business, but yes. I already asked him and he said as long as you sent in a shit load of pictures and were fine with a Skype interview he would let it pass.”

“Why would he make an exception for me? It clearly says that this must be in person.”

“Because I told him there was no way he could miss the opportunity to have you attend his school. I also said I would show him my tits. He’s single so I’m going to pretend it’s fine.”

“You seem to have a lot of misplaced confidence in me. Also, that was a lot of information I didn’t need to know.”

“Well, that’s your punishment for having some girl blow you in my office.”

“That was unplanned and I apologized for that.”

“Listen, Richie, it’s either this weird dynamic we have going on or I have to tell my boss all the rules you break on a daily basis.” Richie rolled his eyes and chuckled at her. He looked back at the requirements.

“Dude, this is a lot of shit.”

“Then you better get working on it.”

It took Richie two weeks to plan everything out and make preliminary sketches of everything. He didn’t really need to worry about the sketchbook pages since he was pretty proud of all of the stuff in his multiple sketchbooks.

Richie had just finished up his last sketch when he decided to text Ryan.

**To Ya Boi Ryan: What time are you getting here today?**

**From Ya Boi Ryan: The same time I get there every day**

**To Ya Boi Ryan: Which is…**

**From Ya Boi Ryan: Like 6**

Richie looked at the time on his phone and sighed, Ryan wasn’t going to be at the school for another two hours. Richie wasn’t going to go back to his house, not when it made him feel like he was suffocating.

**From Ya Boi Ryan: I’m stopping at McDonald's. What do you want?**

**To Ya Boi Ryan: Pancakes and sausage with orange juice**

**To Ya Boi Ryan: And thank you**

Richie sat in the bed of his truck smoking as he waited for Ryan to get to the school. He felt bad for waking Ryan up, he really did, but she was the only one that got him. She was the only one that really knew about what his home life was like. She was the only one that knew about his nightmares.

She had found out about them when he took a nap in her office after school one day. She had a comfortable couch in there and he was exhausted. She had woken him up when he started whimpering from a nightmare.

Richie had been focusing on that memory when he saw the lights of Ryan’s car pull up next to his truck. She just silently got out of her car and climbed into the bed of Richie’s truck with him.

“I got you two orders of pancakes and a large OJ,” she said as she handed him his bag of food.

“You’re the best Ryan.”

“I know. I figured you haven’t eaten anything since lunch yesterday.” Richie nodded. Richie wasn’t sure when Ryan had figured out what his home life was like, but he was glad she did. He liked having someone to talk to. He liked having someone that understood. Even though he never would’ve told her himself and he didn’t really tell her anything.

She was still pretty, young, and carefree, he didn’t want her worrying about one of her students. Especially when nothing was going to change. Richie had begged her not to tell anyone when she told him she knew. Richie knew that if his dad found out, it would only get a lot worse.

Not that his dad hadn’t been getting a lot worse in the past year or two. He had. His dad had just recently found out that Richie had a job at one of the local thrift stores, he had been furious at the news. Wentworth had practically thrown him down the stairs. Richie had to wear a boot for two months for the broken ankle he got out of that.

Ryan had let Richie eat a good chunk of his food before she asked the question he knew was coming. He didn’t want her to ask, but he knew she would.

“So, what was the nightmare tonight?”

“It was me and these kids, I don’t know who they were, their faces were all distorted. We were in this circle holding hands, I think we had just made some sort of pact or something. Then the ground opened up and sucked them in one by one. It started with the kid I think was my best friend, then it was the person I was in love with, then the one I had gotten super close to, then the others one by one. I was alone. I felt abandoned. It felt like I finally had something and It took them from me.”

“How do you know he was there?”

“I could hear his laugh. Plus, he has a smell.”

“What does he smell like?”

“Like a carnival that’s being held in the sewers. It’s so sweet it’s suffocating but also so rank that I couldn’t breathe anyway.”

“I’m sorry Richie.”

“I just want them to stop.”

“Maybe they will when you go to college. When you get away from here.”

“I’ll never be far enough from here though.”

“You would be pretty far at Morrison.”

“If I get in.”

“What do you have planned out so far?” Richie dug the sketchbook he had been planning in out of his bag and opened it up to his planning sketches before handing it to her. “Let’s see what we have here. A bluebird.”

“Something specific to New York. It’s the state bird.”

“A girl smoking on the hood of a car.”

“Monochromatic painting. It’s gonna be shades of red.” He didn’t know where he had seen the girl before, the only thing he remembered about her was her red hair.

“A boy looking at library books.”

“Grey-scale painting figured I could get a lot of different shades in with the books.” He remembered seeing the boy in the library more than once, although he couldn’t remember if that was in a nightmare or in real life.

“Is this one you trapped in a wine bottle?”

“Self-portrait.”

“Is this _Wheel of Fortune_?”

“Yeah. I have to recreate an existing piece. I’m gonna change some of the details to make sure they know I didn’t copy it though.” He planned on replacing the face in the painting with that of a boy he remembered seeing in a pleasant dream he had far too many years ago.

“A boy wearing a gas mask, holding a heart-shaped balloon.”

“Street art themed piece. I got really inspired by Banksy. It’s a combination of a couple different pieces by him.” He remembered the boy being really in love, but not a single person, and more in a platonic way. He remembered that the boy would fight for the ones that he loved. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, everyone listened. He also remembered that the smell of smoke followed him in Richie’s dreams.

“Are you going to create him pulling himself out of a well?”

“Yeah. Supernatural piece. I’m sure I’ll have to explain it but, I feel like if I make him, he’ll start to leave me alone.”

“Two boys, that look like rag dolls?” They were brothers.

“Sculpture. I kinda want to make them small enough to sit on a shelf or something, which is why there’s two of them.”

“Are you going to make them out of clay?”

“Yeah probably. Just to make sure the details can be clear.”

“And what about the sketchbook pages?” She had reached the end of the book and hadn’t seen any of the just sketches that she knew he needed. Morrison wanted ten to twelve of the best pages from his sketchbook, every school wanted stuff from sketchbooks.

“I have them at home, in different ones.”

“These look good Richie, I’m excited to see how they turn out.”

“Do you care if we head in so I can get started. I can wake you up before class starts since I made you come here two hours early.”

“Sure, thing kid.” They hopped out of Richie’s truck and started walking toward the school. Richie decided that he was going to tell Ryan something that had been bothering him for the past few days.

“You know, most of the school thinks we’re fucking.” Ryan snorted into her coffee. “I legitimately had two freshmen come up to me and ask me what it was like to be fucking a hot teacher.”

“What did you say?”

“I said ‘I don’t know’ and when they asked why I told them it was because we weren’t. I think I said something along the lines of you were a family friend that I had known forever which is why we’re close.”  

“Thanks for not joking around and making it seem like we are.”

“I don’t want you to get fired. I might be eighteen but I know fucking a student is crossing a line.”

“Thanks, Richie.”

“Why did you pick teaching? No offense, but you don’t really scream teacher vibes.”

“It wasn’t the first choice. I was originally a graphic design major but my parents didn’t think I would be able to get a job in that so I added art education as a second major. It was rough and I don’t know if teaching is really what I want to do, but it pays the bills.”

“That’s a great reason.”

“Yeah. I’m working on my doctorate in graphic design so maybe that will help.”

“You just want to be called doctor.”

“Oh, a hundred percent.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~

“Morrison University administration office, how may I help you?”

“Hi. My name is Richard Tozier, I need all the mail I get from you guys sent to a different address.”

“Did you move?”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t. His family had lived in the same house since before he was born. He hated lying, but this was a necessity.

“What did you say your name was?”

“Richard Tozier.”

“Have you already been accepted?”

“I’ve been accepted into the school but I haven’t heard anything from my specific program.” Richie heard the typing of keys on the other end of the line. Richie looked at his face in the mirror. His left eye was bruised to shit, his lip was split open, and there was a large bruise forming on his right temple and jaw. His dad did a really good job on his face, Richie knew the rest of him must look worse.

“Okay Mr. Tozier, I have you currently living at 805 Spectra Drive in Riverside, California.”

“Yeah, that’s my old address.”

“What is your new address?”

“1532 Edgar Avenue apartment 17.”

“Still in Riverside?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, so I have your new residence at” she repeated the address to him, and he agreed that it was his new residence. The woman said that his address had been changed and then asked if there was anything else that he needed.

“No that was it.” The woman wished him a good day and then hung up.

Richie decided that he needed to call the person that lived at that address that he told Morrison he lived there now. Not that that person would really care.

“Richie?”

“Hey, Ryan.”

“What’s up? How’s the work going?”

“I have to start one of the pieces over.”

“Why?” _Because my dad saw my acceptance letter to Morrison and beat the shit out of me before he wrecked the piece I was almost done with because he figured out that I was applying as an art student._

“I’ll explain later. I called to tell you that I just got off the phone with Morrison.”

“Why were you on the phone with them?”

“I told them that I moved. So, you’re gonna be getting all my mail from them from now on.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see tomorrow.”

“Richie, do you want to come over for the night?”

“No, I’ll be okay. Thanks for the offer, Ryan. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Richie hung up before she could ask any other questions.

Richie stood up, as much as his ribs disagreed with that, he was sure at least one of them was cracked. He struggled to take his shirt off and saw why that was true. His torso was a lot more bruises than regular pale skin. Wentworth really had done a pretty good job at getting his point across, even if Richie wasn’t going to listen anyway. If anything, he was going to try harder just to spite him.

Richie tried not to cry. He wanted to though. He wanted to more than anything. But he knew crying didn’t do anything to help silence the voice in his head. It had gotten a lot louder since his father’s rant.

_You’re such a fucking screw up. Why can’t you just go into something that will actually make some money? Not that it matters anyway. You’ll never get into Morrison. You’re shit at art and Ryan just humors you like she does with some of the freshmen that can’t draw for shit. So, go ahead and do what you always do, see if it helps this time._

Richie had already started his cigarette by the time the voice in his head was finished. He followed its advice. When he was done with it, Richie rolled up his jeans and shoved the embers against his skin. He was hoping it would help.

It didn’t.

 ~~~~~~~~~~

Richie sat in Ryan’s office, she was running late today. She must have gone out last night. It wouldn’t be the first time Richie had to essentially act as the teacher for first period, it was freshmen art so it wasn’t exactly a difficult thing to teach.

The bell for the beginning of first period rang and Ryan still wasn’t there. Richie called her to ask if she was even coming today. She said she would be there in a minute and for Richie to just start the background video for their new section the kids were going to be working on.

Richie told the kids what the section was and started the video. He went back to Ryan’s desk in the classroom and logged on to her computer. She had given him the login information after the first time they had done this, which was last year. Richie put the attendance in and then leaned back into the chair and started sketching, which was what he almost always did during class. The only time that wasn’t true was when he was working on his admission pieces, but those had been turned in almost two weeks ago.

Richie looked up when he heard the door to Ryan’s office open and she motioned for him to come into the office. He set his stuff down and went into her office. He knew what some of the freshmen in the class were going to assume they were doing.

“This is why people think we’re fucking.”

“Shut up. I have mail for you.”

“From who?”

“Dr. Henry.”

“Who?”

“Head of the art department at Morrison.” Richie grabbed the letter from her hands and stared at it before he opened it. This was it. This was the moment his future was going to be decided. Richie read the letter in this head, his face dropping slightly as he did. “Richie?”

“I got in.”

“You got in?”

“I got in! Holy fuck!” Richie hadn’t smiled this hard in almost a year. “Ryan, I got in. I really did it.” Richie threw himself onto Ryan, wrapping his arms tightly around her shoulders.

“I knew you would Richie.”

 ~~~~~~~~~~

“Got everything you need?”

“Yeah, think so at least. It’s not like I have all that much anyway.” Richie had to sell most of his stuff to get the plane ticket from LAX to New York City. Morrison was about a half hour drive from the city. “I hope this all goes well.”

“It will Richie.”

“What if my roommate doesn’t like me?”

“He will.” He and his roommate would become closer than either of them ever expected.

“What if I don’t make any friends?”

“You will.” He would make six really good friends in fact.

“What if I hate college?”

“Everyone hates college. It’s gonna suck sometimes. But it’s also going to be the best time of your life.”

Ryan really didn’t know it, but that statement was going to be the truest thing Richie was ever told. In just one year of college, Richie was going to find love, experience heartbreak, realize he has a family, achieve one of his biggest dreams, and come to terms with a lot of things about himself.

“Thanks for the ride, Ryan. I’m gonna miss you.”

“You’re gonna love Dr. Henry, you’ll forget all about me.”

“Never.” He wouldn’t. He would think back to the day that Ryan handed him the brochure for the Morrison art program and how much faith she had in him all the time. He would think back on that day whenever he really felt like he didn’t belong in the program or in the art world in general. He’ll always remember the woman that told him he could do it when everyone else in his life told him to give up and figure out something “real” to do with his life.

He hugged her tightly before he turned to go through security. Right before he walked through the checkpoint, he turned to look at her. He liked Ryan. She was the closest thing he had to a friend. He was just hoping this wasn’t going to be the last time he saw her.

It wasn’t. He would see her again in May, although it wasn’t because he was coming back to California.


End file.
